Interview: Humble Bundle On Humble Bundles

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With the astonishing success of the current Humble Origin Bundle, which has so far sold 1.75 million copies, and raised $8.5 million for charities, we grabbed the chance to talk with Humble’s John Graham about how this all feels from their side.

RPS: Even after all the time you’ve been running these Humble Bundles, I bet it’s impossible to have accurate expectations of what’s going to happen with each. The response to the EA bundle has been astonishing – half way through and over 1,600,000 sold, and any moment now $8m. That’s… amazing. How do you as a company even begin to cope with figures this high?

John Graham: Every major bundle in Humble Bundle’s history has felt a bit overwhelming. This promotion is pleasantly no exception.

RPS: Do your accountants ever complain?

John Graham: Only when we demand that they offer us their professional services for pay-what-we-want pricing.

RPS: Although, with this bundle being for charity, did you have expectations of anything close to this?

John Graham: Given the continuing growth of our community, the magnitude of these games and the awesome charities involved, I was guessing the Humble Origin Bundle might rise beyond the 5 million dollar records set by Humble Indie Bundle V and the Humble THQ Bundle. But I was not expecting to be at 8 million dollars already with a week left to go.

RPS: There’s a lot of cynicism regarding EA’s involvement in a bundle. I think, from the perspective of what looks likely to be well over $10m going to various charities, at this point it comes down to a big fat who cares about the motivation, when the results are so amazing. But still, was there a hesitation for you guys when starting to take on some of the biggest publishers in the world? While EA’s non-profit approach certainly earns the “humble” mantle, companies like Deep Silver don’t seem to fit that bill.

John Graham: Our goal is always to make promotions that people want. When we see opportunities to celebrate great content, delight customers with a massive deal and raise tons of money for charity all at once, we have to try. Major credit should be given to Origin and EA for being awesome enough to allow this to happen: not only going the extra mile to offer Steam keys where possible but foregoing a cut in order to raise tons of money for worthy causes. We’ve done many different promotions now that don’t strictly adhere to the original Humble Indie Bundle framework (from eBook bundles to Deep Silver bundles) and have been pretty pleased with everything we’ve tried so far. And rest assured, we are constantly pursuing more Humble Indie Bundles. Opportunities like the Humble Origin Bundle are simply neat things we can do in addition to traditional bundles.

RPS: Do you talk about how much money Humble gets from these bundles?

John Graham: As a rule, we don’t really like to explicitly reveal slider sub splits for fear of causing popularity contests and unhumble earnings comparisons for each participant. Generally, we do find that the slider defaults have inertia and we are very thankful for customers who value what we do and continue to leave us a humble tip.

RPS: On a related note, is there a room in Humble HQ that’s just filled from floor to ceiling with money, into which your employees can swim and roll about? Were there any teething stages, like Scrooge McDuck’s flawed metal money diving choice?

John Graham: Humble Bundle has come a long way from the days Jeff and I launching promotions from our childhood bedrooms of our parents houses because we couldn’t afford an office and this promotion is going to be quite helpful to the company.

RPS: I’m not sure that answers the question. I’m going to assume it’s a “yes”. What were your goals when you started the company? What were the driving forces behind the concept? And how do you think it’s gone realising those?

John Graham: We stumbled across the Humble Bundle concept while working on our ninja rabbit fighting game, Overgrowth, at Wolfire Games. We were trying to layer together all of the cool things we could think of that might create an awesome promotion. Major influences were the “Organic Indie Preorder Pack” we had just successfully launched, which combined Overgrowth and Natural Selection 2 preorders together at a reduced price, and 2D Boy’s pay-what-you-want sale for World of Goo’s birthday.

I feel very fortunate that when I roll out of bed every day that my job is literally to come up with ways to help developers, gamers and charity while growing our humble business at the same time.

RPS: I think a lot of people assumed the Bundle idea would be relatively short lived. That’s certainly proved not to be the case. Did you always have expectations of things lasting?

John Graham: The gaming industry moves fast and it’s surfing on the technology wave at the exponential speed of Moore’s law. I don’t think any business can survive very long by just doing the same thing. Jeff and I didn’t know if the Humble Bundle concept would work in the first place but we had to find out. When it exceeded our expectations grossing 1.2 million dollars in 10 days, we wanted to know what else we might be able to do with our model. Three years later we have evidence that what we thought originally might only apply to indie gaming seems like it may apply to many shapes and sizes of digital content. We’ve now done over 50 million dollars in bundle revenue, raised over 20 million dollars for charity and I think we still have a lot more work left to do.

RPS: And do you have plans in place for when the notion does eventually become replaced by the next new idea?

John Graham: I think we’re a pretty agile group that is likely to come up with additional neat ideas if the bundles stop working. But should the day ever come when Humble Bundle is somehow entirely obsolete, I am quite tempted to go back to working on indie games.

RPS: Do you all discipline yourselves when it comes to watching the success of each bundle? Or do you all obsessive stare at the tickers all fortnight, not getting anything else done?

I’m sorry tiger and el, but both your reasoning is bullshit. EA just saw a way to manipulate you into feeling good so you’ll increase their origin market share.

EA is not doing this out of the ‘goodness of their hearts’. They want to get a large enough installed base like steam has. They are chomping at the bit to do so.

The idea that you’d have to be a ‘cynic’ is bullshit, ALL DRM is bad for gaming. MMO’s, F2P = the increasing death of open modifiable games.

I lived through the golden age of PC gaming and the fact that people like you just think its a bunch of curmudgeonly shit is proof you guys have no idea what you are talking about and are extremely gullible.

DRM has basically conquered the younger members of the gaming audience and them just saying ‘I don’t give a shit’ but that’s just proof that those morons are killing what we older (and smarter younger) liked about PC gaming during the mid 90’s to early 2000’s for the rest of us.

I just want to say this about EA, and the weird phenomenon whereby we judge them, and all other companies, on the great sliding scale of Good /Evil.

I don’t trust or even like EA very much. I do try to avoid buying their products because I generally disagree with much of their recent behaviour and business practice,and hold them largely responsible – along with Ubisoft, Activision, Sony, Microsoft et al – for the anti-consumerist mess that is Big Gaming right now.

But they DO deserve praise for this bundle. No, it’s not entirely selfless. They gain greater exposure, spread Origin, and pick up a few brownie points. Selflessness would be asking too much of a company beholden to shareholders. But…they have agreed to dish out substantial amounts of their software at pocket-change price in order to help selected charities. That is eminently praiseworthy on their part. If more companies acted like this perhaps we’d live in a better world. I bought this bundle. That doesn’t change any of the opinions stated above, or even lessen them. It’s simply a recognition that this was a reasonably good thing they did. And hey – games for cheapness!

Commenters on RPS are passionate people. It’s the by-product of this being our hobby, for many of us our only hobby. I’ve fallen foul of my own passion more than once, been rude to people I shouldn’t have, and argued when I should have agreed. But one thing I’ve always tried to do is take decisions made by any agency, be they single developer or huge publishing house, on their own merits. Some of the rattle-throwing yesterday about TheChineseRoom taking Sony’s money was waaay over the top. I feel the constant sniping at EA gets that way too often. Wolfire also seem to be taking a lot of flak for not sticking to hardcore ethical principles with every bundle. Putting them on pedestals at the start is now leading people to see them in a completely opposite light, which is a bit mad when you think about it.

I guess what I’m saying is it’d be nice if more of us here could remember to maintain perspective about the companies and people we talk about and to. “love ’em or loathe ’em” neatly encapsulates the bulk of comments we see on our hot-button issues – sensible, reasoned,centrist commentary tends to get drowned out.

TL;DR: A plea for calm. EA aren’t angels or demons. They operate in the same grey-areas of existence as we do.

“Wolfire also seem to be taking a lot of flak for not sticking to hardcore ethical principles with every bundle.”

Happens to be Wolfire and Humble Bundle are separate company, just clearing that out. They started from Wolfire, but grew out to be their own thing. Also Wolfire doesn’t get any support from humble bundle.

@Prime
“I just want to say this about EA, and the weird phenomenon whereby we judge them, and all other companies, on the great sliding scale of Good /Evil.”

It is not a weird phenomenon, it is how we evolved on the savannah, where we had to quickly classify things as we didn’t have the leisure to debate pros and cons of that mothafucking tiger chasing you.

The sad thing is, most people still operate – or try to operate – in that simple, largely binary world of good and evil.

They clearly saw it as an opportunity for some good press. They also gain extra Origin installs from it, but also exposure for their new games which are being released. They’ve chose a time to do it when a fair few of the games they are selling through the bundle are due for sequels.

I don’t think anyone is saying that the slate has been wiped clean, just credit where credit is due. EA did some good this time. Some people just seem to be bending over backwards to find ways to make the Origin Bundle make them hate EA even more.

Sure, EA have their reasons, like Origin installs, Dead Space 2 sales, etc, but the fact is they didn’t have to say “All this for $5”. If they have finally realised that crazily lower prices equal more sales, then we will have more competition for Steam, which is A Good Thing.

Yea, my opinion is that Origin is failing hard vs Steam and that its their attempt to at least get the games with no steam key alternative over there.
Generating goodwill is another part of it, but I don’t think because of their altruism and charity love, but simply because they have come to be known as some of gaming’s biggest DRM (expletive here) and need to sanitize PR somehow.

Overall a cunning plan, but I will sooner believe calculated intention and self-interest from these people than anything else.

To me, it looks like Wolfire uses the near infinite flux of money coming from the bundles to finance near unlimited development for Overgrowth. A bit like what Valve is doing with Steam ..
That’s not necessarily a bad thing and it looks like they want to publish Overgrowth next year.

Humble Bundle is a separate company and it’s also probably their full time job given how it prints money.

With the inertia of the default sliders, you can assume Humble get 15%. Which is a lot less than what Valve and Apple take, but the EA sale is still probably going to get them $1M of profit after credit card fees etc.

And more power to ’em. I don’t understand the griping of people who complain that this bundle or that bundle isn’t “pure”, with PC+Mac+Linux and absolutely no DRM. We still get those bundles! We just also get these other bundles inbetween. Wanting the world to have less nice things just because they only meet 95% of your utopian ideal seems an oddly miserable way to live. You must be angry a lot of the time.

Not to mention the extra money raised for charity by these additional bundles. Wasn’t one of the launch intentions to see if people would still find a way to complain given all the positives of the Humble approach? Guess we have an answer. Congratulations, internet, on your infinite capacity for grumbliness.

I don’t understand the griping of people who complain that this bundle or that bundle isn’t “pure”, with PC+Mac+Linux and absolutely no DRM.

Can only speak for myself, but for me, the Humble Bundle had built its brand on some salient specific points, among which were no DRM, support of small/independent developers and charity, and as OS agnostic as possible.

When any of those aspects can be removed at will, what remains is a promotional platform that is little different from any other DD platform it competes with. It gives me less reasons to have any particular interest in it specifically.

Of course, why should they care, they’re making/raising more money by ignoring those things.

Here’s my problem with this: you’re projecting your own values and ideals onto others, and then admonishing them for not upholding these ideals they never claimed to uphold to begin with.

It reminds me of the whole Tiger Woods affair where everyone hemmed and hawed about how devastated they were because Tiger wasn’t the perfect family man they thought he was. Repeatedly, commentators talked about how Tiger was supposed to be the perfect family man, the symbol of monogamy, the example of a happy couple, etc. Which is absurd. I remember seeing commercials and reading articles where he talked about being devoted to the sport and his drive to play, and I remember all the commercials where he talked about playing hard, etc, but I don’t ever recall him holding himself up as the perfect husband, the perfect family man, and some prime example of chivalry. Other people did that. His commercials showcased his sport prowess, not his monogamy. The “prefect family man” label was something others put on him.

Another example is Green Day. I remember so many people saying that Green Day “sold out” when they signed to WB for their “Dookie” album. Right, because Green Day was so ant-capitalism, anti-consumerism, anti-establishment, and had such rugged anarchist principles. They were a pop-punk band that mostly wrote songs about girls. How could Green Day “sell out” from ideals that they never ascribed to?

The point of the Humble Bundle was and always has been to provide bundles of games in a pay-what-you-want format where a portion of proceeds can go to charity. That’s all. This whole “only multiplatform, no DRM, only indie games” is simply others conjuring up their own interpretations and applying them to the Humble Bundle.

Whether we were right or wrong in thinking so, what differentiated the Humble Bundle for some us were those particular points *you couldn’t find elsewhere*, at least not in such a combination.
That’s the only thing that made it different and interesting to us.

There is no “projecting”. As long as the platform does offer those, I find it interesting. When it stops, or do so in an unreliable manner, I don’t.

No hard feeling. They don’t offer anything I want, I don’t do business with them. That’s it.
The worse you can say is that I’m a bit miffed seeing one of the few platforms I could hope to reliably do business with stop being reliable.

You know that the UK is likely to follow suit once a US court has ruled on a particular matter? Once a court hands a ruling down, other courts are like to decide in a similar manner. Who gives a shit where the cases take place.

Charity from the rich is like, I stab you, then put you on my car and drive you to a hospital. You have to thanks me for the ride. On the other hand, once you have donate, the people being helped don’t know and don’t care where the money come from.

yeah, RPS I am still waiting for ANY REPORT of how ORIGIN was nearly not functional for many hours (or maybe days) in redeeming keys, while Steam had no problem at all. 5 seconds vs. 30 minutes is pretty steep.

but maybe you never got my email or I missed a paragraph/sentence/article/etc. about it?

the mail (sent 7 days ago)
“Hi RPS,

it would be great, if you could report on the clusterfuck that
happened (and maybe is still happening) about the redeeming
of products codes of the humble bundle on steam vs. origin.

My personal story: I had redeemed all of my steam (5?) codes
in about 2-4 minutes… on Origin it took me about 30-60 mins for
the first ******* code. And I am not the only one, who had this
problem:link to forum.ea.com

also other parts (their **** help system) respond like **** for me.

this is just ridiculous especially since Valve/Steam had no problems
whatsoever and ea had already such a clusterfuck with crap ehh sim city
launch.

greetings from Saxony
Bernhard

PS: it seems to work now, I just registered dead space in STEAM time
”

btw. 2-4 mins on Steam was referring to the whole process of entering everything NOT the response time after you click the button it was seconds on steam.

the only thing I remember was the Steam homepage not being responsive or building up, which was solved with hitting reload for one or several times, so I guess a delay of 2-4 mins.

the fucking Origin crap had a loading window for 30 mins straight OF UNRESPONSIVENESS.

so far I have about redeemed 15-30 keys on steam and can’t remember a single instance I had to wait more than 2 minutes (probably less).
WAIT! I remember Steam telling me: sorry, the system is overloaded or something, try again. And I did and it worked and it took about 5(?) minutes.

you know that it was I call engineering, you at least have a message that tells the user that something is not working. Origin on the other hand JUST STOPPED (well except for the loading animation).

maybe I was lucky, but the difference in SCALE from my experience is quite huge.
Also important is the CONTINUITY in the fuckup ea is producing: remember SimCity, now don’t tell me the Humble Bundle was a spontaneous action, they couldn’t prepare for, because it is bullshit and with the SimCity launch it was the same.

nope I didn’t use it in the early years, but getting “slashdotted”, “denial of service” (attacks), etc. is not something that never existed and it is addressed in computer science, economics, software engineering, etc.

and if it was a problem with Steam in the early days than I guess and hope someone called them on their bad engineering.

One of the other things taught about DDOS attacks is that engineering solutions only have so much mileage, and there comes a point where the only option is to throw more servers at the problem (which takes some spin-up time to happen).

One of the other things taught about DDOS attacks is that engineering solutions only have so much mileage, and there comes a point where the only option is to throw more servers at the problem (which takes some spin-up time to happen).

Which is why goddamn *every* online game-related service inevitably falls over when people *use* it, not when it’s getting DDOS’ed, sure. Of course, there was nothing that could’ve been done. It wasn’t Maxis’ fault that the SimCity servers were inaccessible at launch. Who could have predicted that people would *buy* their game, and then try to *run* it?

Also, remember a few months ago, when that group of spammers decided to perform the biggest DDOS ever, which observers described as an attempt at taking down the internet? Remember how the company it was targeted at stayed online throughout? Obviously, engineering competency had nothing to do with that. It was magic fairy dust that did it.

And we can’t fairly blame Valve for the *years* of Steam falling over every time a big game was released. Every single time it was utterly inprecedented and probably the work of evil martian hackers working to DDOS the service.

And sadly, Amazon, Microsoft and countless others have *not* for several years now sold solutions allowing online services to run on their data centres and effortlessly scale up and down as needed. And no one have coined the term “cloud computing” to describe it.

And yes, pointing out things that everyone outside the games industry know, understand and are capable of, but which the games industry clearly isn’t, can only be considered “backseat engineering” and thus, can safely be ignored.

Sure, many people did. It didn’t make a difference of course, because normal engineering practices can be safely ignored in the games industry. They don’t need to protect their users’ passwords against hackers, and they are allowed to be *shocked* when their service falls over at launch because it doesn’t scale.

Most of the time, it appears that being a programmer in the games industry is largely an excuse for being utterly incompetent at anything that does not involve 3d graphics.

“2 year old distribution system can’t handle load as well as 10 year distribution system”
nope, but “ea fucked up again after the SimCity launch fiasco”
or
“was the humble origin bundle just a stress test for origin?”
or
“knock knock, who is there? the humble origins bundle”

as mentioned before it is basic engineering: you have a huge queue of requests: tell them to go away and handle the others. There is no message (and mechanics I guess) built into the whole system or at least I never got a message.

EA Downloader was launched in late 2005. It was replaced by EA Link in November 2006, adding trailers, demos and special content to the content delivery service. In September 2007, it was once again replaced by the combination of EA Store and EA Download Manager. Users purchase from the EA Store website and use the downloadable EADM client to download their games. Games bought via EA Link were downloadable using the EA Download Manager. The store and client was reopened under the Origin name on June 3, 2011.

EA has had a digital download service for 8 years. Can we please stop this stupid bullshit of how difficult it is for EA to catch up to Steam because Steam had such a massive head start? Steam didn’t even start selling third-party games until 2005, the exact same year that EA, one of the industry’s biggest publishers, launched their first iteration of their digital distribution platform.

Not like Steam has been doing this for ten years (and was very much Not Good when it launched) and Origin’s a new service facing its first really huge influx of users inputting keys. Not sure why RPS would waste time reporting on an understandable technical issue, and even less sure why they’d do so based on your rage filled letter.

They’re not reporting on it because it’s fundamentally a non-issue. Origin wasn’t registering keys for less than a day and it’s fixed now. What would be the point of reporting on it?

Besides, as others have said, Steam pretty consistently suffers from the same thing. Try buying something in the first few hours of any sale — you’ll have a hell of a time even getting the store page to load, let alone getting the transaction processed. It’s not ideal, but it happens, and it’s not exactly newsworthy.

well, they could have added it to a few related articles in a short paragraph, especially since it is just an indication that they learned not too much from the SimCity overload… or miscalculated the amount of incoming key requests. Also the problem was – maybe – solved pretty fast (I don’t know how long it persisted, because I think I was not buying in the first days, but I could be wrong). Some might even say they learned something… I don’t know how long SimCity wasn’t working well.

I think it’s pretty clear what EA is hoping to achieve here. Polish up their horrid image (especially after the SimCity fiasco) and attract more users for its Origin platform. Honestly, polishing up their image is not illegitimate if they do it through genuinely acts of good. I don’t really see any evil in trying to get more users to Origin either, that’s the goal of sales in brick and mortar stores and those aren’t evil either.

I’m no fan of EA at all, in fact I haven’t bought an EA game in years as I don’t want to give money to people who follow business practices I view as wrong, and I intend to continue doing so. However, getting $8m in donations towards charity is a very good thing. It may be EA, but credit where credit is due, they are doing good here. Sure it doesn’t make up for all the shenanigans, but they are doing good here and they don’t deserve our hate for it, not at all.

EA has problems, but it makes the same selfish choices as every major publisher these days. It seems unfair to drag them out and call them terrible, and not also paint Activision, Ubisoft, 2K, Sony, Microsoft and Square-Enix with the same brush here.

I’m still bitter about the death of Earth and Beyond (loved the crap out of that game) and I don’t like having to maintain two different digital platforms just so I can play Battlefield 3. Purely because of the logistics involved in moving between my active steam friends list, and origin’s barren wasteland – most of my battlefield friends only open it up when they’re playing, and games are organized on Steam beforehand.

EA and all of the major publishers all have things i’d like to see changed when it comes to PC gaming, but stubbornly boycotting them when they do something good is just going to hurt things in the long run.

No. I will continue considering EA evil, until they prove otherwise (this is a business scheme, sacrifice minor gains for increased use of Origin).
Just because other companies are also evil does not mean EA is not.
Dead Space 3, Mass Effect 3, Sim City 3(+2) and Dragon Age 3 have all been thrown under the bus by EA in an attempt to increase profit, and have been negatively impacted by business practices (DS3’s microtransactions, ME3’s war resources, SC’s always online lies, DA3’s mandatory TSA rectal inspection prior to every play session.)
(Yes, Dragon Age 3, I’m from the future.)

Every cent they get is given to them willingly by the people (like myself) who chose not to slide the ‘Humble Tip’ down to zero. If you don’t think they deserve a tip then don’t give it to them, or if you don’t care about the charities and think Humble Bundle Inc. deserves all your donation then you can do that too. The fact that you can tailor your donation how you want is part of the attractiveness of the Humble Bundle.

And that is absolutely irrelevant. The opening paragraph was inaccurate. The opening paragraph said “8.5 million for charity” when in reality, $1.3 million went to Humble Bundle.

(And the majority of that $1.3 million likely went to Sequoia Capital, the investors behind Humble Bundle, who don’t care about charity, they just know pretending they do and getting 15% is better than ditching the charity.)